Art “We Try To Win, But We Don’t Know” Howe gets the gate. I can’t speak to whether this is deserved; the scuttlebutt seems to be that the manager is not taking a hard enough line with certain lazy veterans.
If dumping Piazza isn’t an option, I guess this is the smart move. Any Mets fans care to comment?

David Ortiz, Johnny Damon, and other Hose get with the trash-talking prior to this weekend’s showdown.
And, you know, they’ve got us on the facts. Our pitching is so shitty right now that I keep thinking I’m watching a Tigers game, and despite a few recent encouraging starts, our middle “relief” is anything but, the Loaiza trade looks dumber with each passing day, and A-Rod still is not getting enough done with guys on base. Right now Boston is the better team, handily.
But trying to roll up on the Yankees all “we’ll beat your asses” is…whatever. Seriously, whatever. First of all, trying that kind of high-school-football intimidation tactic on the winningest franchise in the game is sad. Second of all…you probably won’t beat anything but yourselves, same as you always do.
So, we’ll see. My prediction: Boston takes two out of three but still can’t win the division.

Please please please go to New Green Bo for dinner. Tonight.
Though the Citysearch review tries to antagonize me into believing that this restaurant’s soup dumplings “attracted much attention when they were first discovered by mainstream food critics several years ago,” I feel I must call attention to them once more. For they are earth-shattering in their deliciousness. Go there.
It ain’t pretty. But if it’s pretty and in Chinatown, it’s probably no good.

Ad I stared at on the downtown R for twenty minutes:
“Imagine having room for a table instead of burning your crotch!”
I…wha?

Not quite three years ago, a man named Don was my disaster buddy. I never got to say thanks; if you know where I can find him, drop me a line.

If anyone’s planning to check out the symphonic-movie dealie at St. Ann’s Warehouse this weekend, please post and let us know what it was like. I can’t go but I’m curious.
On a not totally unrelated subject…do any of y’all know if Void is still operational? Void was/is a bar on, I think, Mercer, close to Canal, that would play surf movies and whatnot on the back wall and pair it with trip-hop; they had tabletop video games and stuff like that. Back in the day when I had a public access show, they’d always hold the producers’ party (…I know, whatever) there. Cool space, and I’d always run into someone I knew there randomly (once my brother materialized at the end of the bar and I was like, “Whoa, worlds colliding”).

I got from close to the tip of Cape Cod back to the NYC city limits in four and a half hours yesterday — pretty good time, even for a leadfooted Jersey girl (and really good when you factor in how many times I had to stop to REPAIR MY CAR’S FRONT BUMPER WITH CHEWING GUM, and sadly, that is no kind of exaggeration at all, there’s the better part of an economy pack of Trident Original Flavor holding that bitch on right now, ARGH, fucking Jetta, ANYWAY).
From the edge of the Bronx to my house? Another TWO HOURS, and that’s AFTER I bailed out on the BQE at Atlantic Avenue and took 4th Avenue south to my happy home in Dykerhurst or whatever the hell they’re calling this neighborhood now.
Whatever. Regardless. That is INSANE to me, that on a Wednesday at 3:30 PM, it takes me two hours to go seven miles. And I don’t get it. Does rush hour start at 2 PM now? Do New Yorkers not know how to drive in the rain? (Actually, anecdotal evidence suggests that this is true, which I don’t get, since we get more rainy days than Seattle. People, it’s a little water. Cope.) Did everyone else have the same “sneak back into the city on a weekday” post-vacay idea I did? Or are there just too many damn cars on the road these days?
I love my car, don’t get me wrong. Okay, I don’t love my actual car. My actual car is an abusive shitpile. I love *having* a car, because…Jersey girl, that’s how we do. But I think we need some kind of legislation, or restrictions, or driver day rationing (like, if you have a MWF card, you can’t drive on Thursdays), or something, to force people to take public transit, because it seems to me as though traffic is getting noticeably worse, just in the past few months, and do not get me started on the insane clown double-parking in Brooklyn because ACK. I think there are just too many cars in NYC, and I think we need, I don’t know, a lottery or something to see who gets to have a car here, and if I lose on that, well, okay, the Jetta goes to Jersey and stays there, but it’s becoming a big problem.
If anyone else is seeing an increase in traffic/driver stupidity lately — or is seeing the opposite — please comment, but it’s getting worse from my perspective, and my friends with bikes report that it’s getting worse too.
Also, if this post made you want to ditch your auto, consider giving it to charity. It’s a sweet write-off; I’d do it myself but I think the car is supposed to actually HELP people, which mine wouldn’t. Because HATE.

Self-whoring has always taken a back seat to actual, y’know, news and information on this blog. I thought it was time to reverse the trend, if I may.
http://www.nymf.org/monica.htm
Okay. Couple of things:
1) We are very excited to be associated with this festival.
2) That’s not actually my name (Daniel J. Blau).
3) That’s not actually my brother’s name (Adam Blau).
4) That’s not actually Tracie’s name (Tracie Potochnik).
5) I thought we were keeping our own reservation list until about sixteen point four seconds ago.
6) I looked at the “genre guide” way too quickly, and I really thought they considered our show to fit into the genres of: family, gay-themed, improvised, cabaret, comedy, drama, contemporary sounds, classic musical theatre, special event, and music theatre.
7) We are very excited to be associated with this festival.
I would tell you all to come, but, well, still not sure…

i’m sure you’ve all heard of the staten island ferry, especially after that terrible crash that killed a bunch of people this last year. don’t let that scare you away from a FREE FERRY RIDE!!! it’s a nice ride that goes from the southern end of manhattan to staten island, and they leave pretty frequently, 24/7.
me and some girlfriends went there this sunday to bike around the staten island botanical gardens. we packed lunches and expected a quiet afternoon filled with flora and pollinating insects. instead, we stumble upon an irish dancing competition, where most of the girls looked like this:

dude! i couldn’t believe it. the costumes were outrageously stitched gold and glittered dress aprons adorned with fushia flashes of pink and unreal greens. there were over a hundred girls jumping around wearing the craziest curly wigs i’ve ever seen. so curly, they bounce like springs whenever they riverdance around! what was so freaky, other than the insane leaps and foot egg-beating, was that this all resembled more of a discovery of a strange alien race than a dance competition. at least they still appreciate the goodness of funnel cake and zeppolis. yummm….
by the way, i’m not dissing the dancers. they have talent beyond what i can muster. it’s just so crazy that a time-honored cultural tradition can be so commercialized with totally fake wigs and costumes starting at $300 a pop. where are we headed?

Went into the Vice store today on Lafayette with some friends of mine. One of them, we’ll call him Joe, found a sweet white leather jacket by J. Lindeberg for $160, that usually costs $700. Post purchase we walked down the street to the G Star store only to find out as Joe’s walking through the store’s security sensors that the Vice store had left a security tag on the jacket’s sleeve. When he went back to Vice to have it removed they claimed to have lost the security tag remover and suggested he go up the street to a store called Supreme–Stop. Sounds pretty ridiculous right? Well, it gets worse. We walk up to Supreme and the store’s closed for rennovations. We go back to G Star to see if they can help. They can’t cuz the security tag is a European model… WHAT? So, the Vice store’s selling $700 J.Lindeberg jackets for $160 that happen to have European sensor tags on them? Interesting….